A Death On The Wolf Read online

  A Death On The Wolf

  Title Page

  PART ONE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  PART TWO

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  PART THREE

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  PART FOUR

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Epilogue

  A DEATH ON

  THE WOLF

  G. M. FRAZIER

  Copyright © 2011 by G. M. Frazier

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only and may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy.

  Cover photo of the Wolf River by Mike Kennedy.

  For Daddy

  1930 – 1984

  When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

  1 Corinthians 13:11, KJV

  PART ONE

  Chapter 1

  The Summer of 69

  The summer I turned sixteen I shot a man. It was 1969. Neal Armstrong walked on the moon. Hurricane Camille destroyed our farm. And I shot a man.

  I grew up near the town of Bells Ferry, Mississippi, on the Wolf River, about twenty miles north of Pass Christian. The farm house we lived in was a modest white frame structure built by my mother’s parents. My father was an ex-Marine, a widower, and a millwright at the carbolineum plant in Bells Ferry. My mother died in 1963 giving birth to my sister, Sachet. I was supposed to be a junior—Patrick Lemuel Gody, Jr.—but my mother prevailed upon my father at the hospital to give me her maiden name, Nelson, so Patrick was relegated to second place on my birth certificate. As for the surname, our ancestors were French and came to this country in the eighteenth century. They settled around New Orleans, and our family name had originally been spelled “Godet” but got Anglicized sometime after the family migrated into southern Mississippi.

  It was summertime, and from May until September my days would be marked by the routines only family farm living offers. There was always grass to mow, weeds in the garden, pine needles to rake, a cow to milk, peripatetic goats to round up, okra to pick, tomato vines to stick and tie, potatoes to dig, corn to shuck, beans to snap, and a hundred other chores. Add to all that the part time job I had taken at Dick’s ESSO station in town, usually working three afternoons a week. But life wasn’t all work, as there was always ample opportunity for a quick swim in the Wolf River, which was less than a mile down the road from our house. Frankie Thompson was my best friend, just four months younger than I, and because his family ran a small dairy farm, he was as busy as I was during the summer. But we usually managed to get away for an hour or two nearly every afternoon for a swim in the cool dark waters of the spring-fed Wolf. Our spot on the river was “secret,” a pristine white sand beach not visible from the road and shaded by the trees where we swam and occasionally pitched a tent for camp-outs. Frankie and I had cut a path to it through the woods back in the fourth grade, and so far no one outside our circle of friends and family had discovered it—that we knew of.

  With the exception of my job at the ESSO station, the summer of 1969 had begun like every other summer I could remember since starting school. Now that July had rolled around, and my routine was set, I assumed it would run its course and finish like all my summers that had come before it. I could not have been more wrong. This was to be my summer of endings and beginnings. A summer of life. A summer of love. A summer of loss. A summer of death.

  — — —

  On this first Monday in July, I was in charge of preparing dinner for Sachet and myself. Daddy rarely got home from work before six o’clock, so our Aunt Charity normally saw to our meals in the evenings—except on Tuesdays (her bridge night) and the first Monday of each month (her Eastern Star meeting). As I took the loaf of bread out of the pantry, I glanced at the clock on the kitchen wall by the ice box. It was almost 6:30. My sister was sitting over at the table, so I took the bread, grape jelly, and peanut butter over there and began making her sandwich.

  As I began spreading the jelly on the bread, Sachet said, “I don’t like it like that.”

  “Sash, this is a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I’m putting the jelly on the bread. What is there not to like?”

  “You’re putting it on thick,” she said. “I like the jelly to be thin and the peanut butter to be thick.”

  I looked at my sister. Our house was not air conditioned, and the big fan over in the corner was blowing her long blond hair around her face in soft swirls. Over the course of her five and a half years on this earth, I had made Sachet dozens, maybe hundreds, of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I had come to expect some complaint about this or that, but she had never made me aware of this requirement. I took the knife and scraped some of the jelly off. “Better?” I asked.

  She nodded, then said, “Do you think they’re really going to the moon?”

  “Yes,” I replied, “they’re really going to the moon.”

  The launch of Apollo 11 was just a little over a week away, and given that every S-IC booster of the Saturn V rocket was assembled down at Michoud in New Orleans, and then test fired at NASA’s Mississippi Test Facility outside of Picayune, the event was as big a deal around here as it was in Houston or Cape Kennedy. Daddy’s brother, my Uncle Rick, worked at MTF. He was an engineer and worked for NASA, but I wasn’t sure what he did. He was able to get us guest passes to the test firings, which were something to see, hear, and feel. Of course, everyone within fifty miles of MTF heard and felt the thunderous roar of those five F-1 engines when they would light off during a booster test. In fact, the last test left a crack in one of the windows in the principal’s office at my school.

  I was now spreading peanut butter on the other slice of bread. I watched my sister’s green eyes as they followed the knife’s every movement from the jar to the bread. She was carefully scrutinizing my culinary skills, ever ready to offer a criticism should I not perform to perfection.

  “Aunt Charity says people were not meant to go to the moon,” Sachet said. “She says God won’t like it.”

  I finished the final assembly of Sachet’s sandwich, placed it on a paper plate, and then slid it across the table to her. “Aunt Charity is an old fuddy-duddy,” I said. I went over to the junk drawer in the kitchen and got a rubber band.

  “How old is Aunt Charity?” my sister asked as I started pulling her hair back to get it out of her face.

  I had to stop and think about her question. “She’ll be forty in November,” I said, and fastened the rubber band around the pony tail.

  Aunt Charity was Mama’s twin, and Mama was thirty-four when she died. Mama had two sisters: her twin, Charity, and their older sister, Faith. Mama’s name was Hope, and she was the middle of the three sisters: Faith, Hope, and Charity. Even though Mama and Aunt Charity were twins, she was, by a few minutes, the oldest. Aunt Faith lived up
north somewhere with her second husband. Mama’s funeral was the last time I had seen her, and my only recollection of her almost six years later was the smell of cigarettes and stale White Shoulders.

  “Do you want milk or tea to drink?” I asked Sachet.

  “Milk,” she said.

  I went over to the ice box, got the pitcher of cold milk and poured Sachet a glass.

  “Aren’t you going to eat?” she asked me as I set the glass in front of her.

  “I’m not hungry,” I replied.

  “You’d have to eat if Aunt Charity was here. She’d make you.”

  “She’s not here. And if she were, you wouldn’t be eating that.” I pointed to the sandwich. The only time we could eat like this was when Aunt Charity was away. And heaven help us if she found out Daddy had taken us into town to eat at the Colonel Dixie, the only hamburger joint in Bells Ferry. The Bobby Dean Diner in town was fine, but the Colonel Dixie was off limits as far as our aunt was concerned.

  Sachet took her first bite of the sandwich and I waited for the inevitable critique I knew would be forthcoming. But she just chewed and chewed and then took a gulp of milk. I replaced the pitcher of milk in the ice box and decided to leave well enough alone and not ask her how the sandwich was.

  “Mama will be forty in November, too,” Sachet said.

  “If she were still alive,” I said.

  “So me and Mama and Aunt Charity have the same birthday?”

  “Yes.”

  “And I’ll be six.”

  “Yes.”

  “So Mama died on my birthday and her birthday and Aunt Charity’s birthday.”

  “Eat your sandwich,” I said. This was an exchange my sister and I had had many times.

  “If Mama and Aunt Charity were twins, how come Aunt Charity doesn’t look like Mama in the pictures?”

  I pulled out the chair at the table and sat down across from Sachet. This was a new inquiry that was taking this familiar conversation into uncharted territory. There was no way I could explain the genetics, which I wasn’t even sure of myself, but I knew if I didn’t give my sister an answer (and one she’d be satisfied with), I’d be dealing with this issue until bedtime. “Some twins are identical and some aren’t,” I offered.

  “What’s ‘identical’ mean?”

  “That means they look exactly alike.”

  “Oh.” She took another bite of her sandwich and chewed. “Do you still remember Mama?” she mumbled through the goo in her mouth.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you miss her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Me, too.”

  I could have easily pointed out the obvious to my sister, but I knew what Sachet meant. She didn’t miss Mama; she missed having a mother. It’s a terrible thing to lose your mother when you’re ten years old—but maybe worse still to have to grow up without one at all. Aunt Charity had stepped in to fill the void from the day Daddy brought Sachet home from the hospital, but it wasn’t the same. I knew it. Sachet knew it. And I suppose, most of all, Daddy knew it.

  Aunt Charity was taller than I remember Mama being. She had brown hair. Mama’s was blond like mine and my sister’s. Our aunt lived next door to us in a big brick house that her husband had built in 1959. Jack Jackson, my Uncle Jack, had been a captain in the Marines, a decorated veteran of the Korean Conflict. Daddy eschewed college, enlisted in the Marines right at the end of World War II, and was discharged in 1950 with the rank of Sergeant. He got out before things really got going in Korea, so he never saw action. But he was in the Military Police, so he may not have been sent overseas anyway. He and Mama got married in ’51 and I came along in ’53. Mama had had two miscarriages before I was born.

  Aunt Charity and Uncle Jack didn’t have any children. Uncle Jack was a career Marine officer who took a commission when he graduated from Ole Miss in ’52, the same year he and Aunt Charity got married. He was killed back in ’66, in “Lyndon Johnson’s infernal war” (to quote my father). Daddy had supported Barry Goldwater in ’64 and he said the war in Vietnam would have long been over by ’66 if Goldwater had been in the White House. Aunt Charity agreed with him. She said we all would have been dead by 1966 if Goldwater had been President. Listening to Daddy and Aunt Charity talk politics was entertaining, to say the least.

  Before Mama died, Aunt Charity had been a school teacher, and she taught me and all my friends in the first grade. But she also “had money,” which was a quaint way in Mississippi of describing someone you were fairly sure was financially well off, but unsure just how well off they were. There were people who were “rich,” and those that “had money.” Aunt Charity was of the latter: She didn’t have to work. She lived in a nice house. She always drove a new Cadillac. And she had a white housekeeper. Aunt Charity paid me $20 each week during the summer to mow her lawn and keep the pine needles raked up. During the winter she always found something for me to do around her house so she could pay me $20 a week. Years later, I learned that Aunt Charity was very well off indeed from Uncle Jack’s oil and gas leases from his family’s land over in Louisiana—land and leases he’d left to her. Land and leases she subsequently bequeathed to my sister and me.

  I heard the squeak of the screen door on the back porch, then: “You all home?” It was Parker Reeves, the colored man Daddy had hired back in January to help out on our small farm—a decision I was still trying to figure out since we didn’t need any help, especially back in the dead of winter.

  “We’re in here,” I hollered out the open kitchen door.

  Parker appeared in the doorway, hat in hand. “Mr. Nels, them goats done got out again and are all over in Miss Charity’s yard. I tried to get ’em up but they’s too quick.” I don’t know why Parker insisted on calling me “Mister Nels.” I suppose it was the remnants of the etiquette of the Old South, but it made me uncomfortable. I was fifteen-going-on-sixteen and he was old enough to be my great-grandfather. But to him I was “Mr. Nels” or “Mr. Nelson.” Even Sachet, at five years old, was “Miss Sash.”

  I looked at Sachet. “When you finish, I want you to go wash your hands and face, brush your teeth, and put your pajamas on. You can watch some TV until I get back. I Dream of Jeannie comes on tonight. I’m going to help Parker get those goats up before Aunt Charity gets back and has a fit.”

  Sachet nodded and then gave me a little smile. She knew there would be hell to pay if Aunt Charity came home from her Eastern Star meeting and saw those goats in her yard, especially if they had been eating any of her flowers. “What about a bath?” she asked.

  “No bath tonight,” I said, getting up from the table. “You had one last night.”

  Chapter 2

  Daddy’s Way

  It was after nine o’clock and Daddy had not gotten home. I had taken a bath and was in my pajamas, sitting in Daddy’s recliner watching The Carol Burnett Show on the TV. Sachet was in bed asleep. I had finally gotten her down at 8:30, which was a half-hour past her bed time. She did not like to go to bed without seeing Daddy, but I knew if he was not home by eight, something was wrong at the plant and it was no telling what time he might get in. I had heard Bear, our collie, barking a few minutes ago when Aunt Charity got home from her meeting. The goats were back inside the fence behind the barn, and they hadn’t done too much damage in her yard. With darkness fast approaching, I was hoping she would not notice.

  I heard Bear bark again along with the sound of Daddy’s pickup, with its tell-tale exhaust leak, pulling in behind the house. I got up and went to the kitchen.

  As Daddy stepped through the kitchen door, the phone rang. Since the phone was on the wall right inside the door from the back porch, he caught it on the second ring. “Hello?”

  I stood there watching him listen to whoever was on the other end of the line. It was unusual for us to get any phone calls this late at night.

  “I don’t know,” Daddy said. “I just got home.” He put his hand over the receiver and looked at me. “Did the goats get out again?” he
asked.

  “Yes,” I said, and rolled my eyes to heaven. It was Aunt Charity on the phone.

  Daddy smiled and I could tell he was trying not to laugh. “Yes, Charity…I’m sorry. It won’t happen again…I know…I know. Yes…yes…soon as I get the lumber. Right. I promise. Yes…goodnight.” He hung up the phone.

  I walked over and took Daddy’s lunch box from him as he hung his hardhat on the coat rack beside the door. He smelled of sweat and creosote and grease, a cocktail of scents I had grown up with and did not find objectionable at all. I took the thermos from the lunch box and went over to the sink to wash it and get it ready for tomorrow.

  “Thank you, son,” I heard Daddy say behind me as he sat down at the table.

  “You had to work over tonight?” I asked rhetorically. I flicked the switch for the fluorescent light over the sink and poured out the bit of cold coffee still in the thermos while I waited for the running water to get hot.

  “The number two boiler went down at three this afternoon and we spent five hours working on it,” Daddy said.

  The water was hot now and I started washing out the thermos. I looked in the dark glass of the window over the sink and I could see Daddy’s reflection. He was watching me. “Do you want me to fix you something to eat?” I asked.

  “I stopped down at the Colonel Dixie and got me a burger when I got off work. I ate it on the way home.”

  “Don’t let Aunt Charity find out,” I said, looking at Daddy’s reflection in the window glass. He chuckled to himself.

  “Nelson, we’re going to have to rebuild the fence behind the barn this weekend,” Daddy said. “Your Aunt Charity has reached her limit with the goats, and mending the fence every other day isn’t working anymore. And Parker is too old to be chasing after the goats every time they get out.”